San Francisco in the Spring

The Paul McCartney Exhibit at De Young—April 6, 2025

De Young Museum San Francisco

I can’t remember the first time I heard a Beatles’ song. I do remember my babysitter, who lived next door to us in Thetford England, perusing my dad’s copy of The White Album. She told me that John Lennon was not nice, but Ringo and Paul were. I later came to believe that John Lennon was simply more outspoken, and it got him into some trouble. When I was much older, I came to agree with his vision of the world, or at least the idea of what it could be.

Today, I went to the de Young Museum to see the recent Paul McCartney exhibit that included several photographs he’d taken during the Beatles’ first American tour in 1963 when they performed on The Ed Sullivan Show. The pictures provided a profound and definitive understanding of life on the road for these four young men, who one point, even McCartney called kids. Reflecting upon these images today, McCartney felt admittedly shocked by their enormous success at such a young age. In his careful analysis of his own work, it appeared as if he were talking about someone other than himself and his bandmates.

Eyes of the Storm: Paul McCartney Exhibit

Many years later, McCartney recalled taking several photographs from this period of his life. The pictures record the very early part of the Beatle’s career when they worked seven days a week, and everyone wanted to photograph them. It was a whirlwind. So it’s no surprise that McCartney didn’t quite remember the thousand and more photographs taken between December 1963 through 1964 when group had traveled from Liverpool to London, Paris, New York, Washington D.C. and finally Miami. But important to note is that it was such a pivotal and iconoclastic time in pop culture history with 73 million viewers watching the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Harder still is to imagine how irrevocably their lives changed during that course of time. The photographs are like indulging in someone’s private family history. You see images of McCartney’s parents, Harrison’s mother and sister pictured separately, all four Beatles getting into a pillow fight at a hotel room, joking around in Paris to lighten the mood, and finding reasons to laugh in spite of the nervousness of getting up on stage in front of thousands of people.

Kate Folk at Booksmith on Haight Street April 9

Kate Folk Reading from Sky Daddy

A writer can write about anything—even sexualizing an object that manifests into total obsession. In Sky Daddy, Kate Folk takes that notion to its logical, uncomfortably hilarious extreme. The story centers on Linda, a woman adrift in her own life, watching the world from a distance. She moderates video content for only $20 an hour and rents a garage in San Francisco. Her life is uneventful—except for the end of each month when she takes BART to SFO and flies roundtrip.

For Linda, flying is not about reaching a destination. It’s about the plane itself, a date with a mysterious new lover—not an actual person. The plane’s sleek features and thrusting engine produce powerful intrigue. And the ultimate thrill? The possibility that the plane might crash. That delicious, terrifying “maybe.”

On Wednesday night, the room at Booksmith was packed—completely sold out. The crowd wasn’t just there out of curiosity; they were already fans of Folk’s work. Despite its bleak premise, Sky Daddy is hilariously entertaining. Folk’s dry, deliberate sense of humor carried through the entire event, making even the darkest themes feel oddly delightful. Her first work, a collection of short stories titled Out There, set the stage for this kind of speculative exploration. Taking up to five years to write, this is her first novel. She spoke candidly about the challenge of moving from short stories to something larger and more interior, slowly unfolding Linda’s psyche in a way that felt authentic.

I had the pleasure of sitting directly in front of Folk’s partner who shared about a recent trip to New York to meet Folk’s editor and her team at Random House, who worked on her book. It added a nice layer of intimacy to the night—this glimpse into the real-world work behind the strange, stylized fiction.

When the reading ended, nobody rushed out. People lingered in the aisles, flipping through pages, still discussing Folk’s sharp wit of what they’d just heard. Outside, the cafes and bars along Haight Street were still buzzing. Even at 9 p.m. on a Wednesday, the city felt alive. And so did the crowd, trickling out into the night with stories—and maybe a bit of Linda’s odd hunger—still echoing in their heads.

The intersection of Eddy and Larkin in San Francisco’s Tenderloin.

Walking through the Tenderloin on a Guided Tour: April 12

When someone new to the city visits the Tenderloin, they characterize it as “colorful” or “diverse.” When I first moved to San Francisco, I thought no more about this neighborhood beyond a part of town where the desperate go about their business, and for the most part, mind their own business. Over the years visiting San Francisco on and off, the reality of the Tenderloin has taken shape as one of the grittiest parts of the city with a visual depiction of disparity, homelessness, drug addiction—a place for those who have nowhere else to go. But to leave it at that would be shortsighted, to say the least. On the Tenderloin Museum website, the neighborhood is defined as “misunderstood,” a far more accurate description that welcomes curiosity about its past.

This weekend, I went on a walking tour of the Tenderloin. Our guide, a woman originally from New York, graduated from Cal Poly in the sciences and engineering department. Having lived in San Francisco for several years, she shared a wealth of historical information about a neighborhood frequently overlooked, beginning with its history from the great earthquake of 1906 to rebuilding the city through 1917.

Acknowledgement of the Transgender Cultural District in the Tenderloin

To reach the museum, I walked from Van Ness up to Eddy Street and arrived at the corner of Eddy and Leavenworth. The walk down Eddy offered a snapshot of daily life, a street fair / block party played disco music, and people from the neighborhood danced without any inhibitions. A small group of men and women on the corner of Eddy and Larkin sold used goods while socializing with one another. On the sidewalk leading up to Leavenworth, an Asian man laid paralyzed on the street, his eyes half open. He did not look homeless but instead wore a biker jacket, his blue-black hair tied in a ponytail. No one stopped to check if he had overdosed, let alone, whether he was alive.

Since I arrived at the museum early for the walking tour, I wondered around inside, learning a little about the brothels from the past dating back to the 1920s, gay bars originating shortly after WWII, police corruption, the LGBTQ+ movement predating the 1960s. Before the tour began, I ran across the Eddy Street and bought a bottle of water. Outside the small local grocery store, a man drinking a beer, presumably in his sixties, sat in his wheelchair, his hair and beard long, a MAGA hat propped up on his head. I hesitated when I reached the corner, grabbing for the front door of the store. He caught my attention, and I wanted to talk to him. He must have felt my impulse when he made direct eye contact with me. But I hesitated too long, and the moment passed. I wanted to take his picture and offer to buy him a beer. Talk to him. Ask his opinion on things. I regret the lost opportunity.

Plaque outside the Compton Cafeteria to commemorate the 1966 riot.

By the time I came back to the museum, everyone gravitated to the front of the museum, waiting for our guide who showed up on time, waiting for a few more on the tour to join us. Whether you have visited San Francisco or not and have any sense of adventure, take the tour. It deepened my understanding of this neighborhood, while at the same time, it continues to remain a mystery to me.

The first stop was the museum itself, originally the Cadillac Hotel. Today the hotel is an SRO, a single residency Occupancy where each tenant has a room of their own and share a kitchen and bathroom. These residencies are frequent and popular throughout the Tenderloin. Built a year after the earthquake, though, this same hotel hosted wealthy visitors. At one point in its history, the hotel’s original Grand Ballroom was leased by Newman’s Gym, a legendary training facility for boxers. Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, and Mayor Willie Brown worked out there. When its owner, Don Stewart passed away in 1995, the Loopers leased the space to a federal Head Start program that promoted school readiness programs. This landmark has undergone many transformations.

Wall mural of Hank Wilson cofounder of the hospice at the Ambassador Hotel.

Moving forward, our guide led us to the Compton’s Cafeteria and provided historical facts concerning transgender resistance preceding Stonewall of 1966. Before the police began raiding the cafeteria, it had been a safe place for transgender people to hang out late at night and buy a reasonably priced meal. As we proceeded ahead, we came to know about the illustrious list of people who owned buildings and even lived in the Tenderloin, such as the science writer Miriam Allen deFord who studied at Wellesley and was active in the Women’s suffrage. For twenty years, she resided at the Ambassador Hotel at 55 Mason Street and passed away there at the age of 86 on February 22, 1975.

Later on in the 1970s, the Ambassador Hotel transformed into a hospice for AIDS patients, a dark time in the city’s history. AIDS activist and survivor, Hank Wilson, co founded this hotel and several other organizations. For more information about Wilson, check out a story from the SF Gate.

Dashiell Hammet, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis lived in the Tenderloin among single drifters, like myself when I moved there in 1992, low income seniors, people with disabilities have all occupied this part of the city, hence its diversity.

The unit where I lived on Bush and Hyde was a one room apartment (studio—the Worthington Apartments) and had a small kitchenette, small bathroom with shower and a room that overlooked the south bay. At the time, it was perfect. I always referred to it as “lower Nob Hill,” which is inaccurate. Our guide specifically corrected such naïve notion. One either lives in NOB HILL or they live in the TENDERLOIN, but living in the Tenderloin does not qualify as living in Nob Hill. From Van Ness to Powell, and from Market Street to Pine Street is the Tenderloin neighborhood.

Worthington Apartments: My apartment was the fourth row up, window on the right until I moved to the backside of the building a couple months later.

I walked around those streets in my early twenties after graduating from college in Sacramento and moving to San Francisco as if nothing was a big deal. The senior wheeling his way up Hyde Street or the homeless man injured in a construction accident in Russian Hill and sitting outside what used to be Cala Foods, with his hand out—were all commonplace scenes. Financially at the time, I wasn’t far off from joining any one of the homeless folks. Making only $2000 a month and paying $575 in rent, I lived a paycheck-to-paycheck existence. I stayed very much in the moment. About a year later, I moved to the Sunset District and rented a room on 10th Avenue and Kirkham. Fired from my job—let go was how I put it at the time—resulted in the necessity to downsize. But that’s a whole other story. Though life changed quite a bit over the past three decades, I will never forget walking up Bush Street from the Financial District after work, getting on my motorcycle on a Friday night to go out for a beer—all dressed up too. It was crazy to be young and so impervious to the pressure of a looming future.